There seems to be a common theme for folks who come to the board. Often the problem isn't one of available programs but the ability to find these programs. I think it would be beneficial to have a thread with common search terms to assist these folks in finding programs. I'll start: I use the following most often: "online xxx in yyy" site:.edu where xxx is the degree sought (BA/BS/MA etc...) and yyy is the subject I then substitute various terms for online including distance (learning), continuing education, adult studies, etc... I limit the search domain to .edu but there are others that could also work. I hope others can add to this thread.
Here's one of my standard search routines using the advanced search function at Google. all these words: subject area of interest e.g. English Literature exact wording or phrase: distance learning but don't show pages that have: resume search within site or domain: .edu You can change the domain as needed to search British, Australian, South African universities. You can even change it to degreeinfo.com and use it to search our own site a bit more effectively than our own search function. Happy hunting.
There seems to be little agreement on the terminology used. I have found that many programs are listed under "continuing education" or "distance education", as well as "distance learning". Several fully on-line programs do not use the term on-line or online at all. Some other terms that have worked are "virtual campus" or "virtual college" or some variant. Also variations on "electronic xx". "Independent study" also finds some. Also try variations on "extended learning".
I do similar things. "online xxx in yyy" will return degree programs but won't be as effective with non-degree programs or individual classes. I use the advanced-search page and try required search terms like "distance learning" or 'online' or 'correspondence'. Kari has some good suggestions on that. Then in the 'contains at least one of these words' field, I try an assortment of words that I anticipate might be on a webpage offering what I'm looking for. It takes some experimenting and sometimes some tuning (often to screen out unwanted kinds of hits) but it usually returns some interesting results. One thing that I don't usually do is restrict my DL searches to the .edu domain. That would screen out most offerings outside the United States. And since I'm not especially looking for degree programs in these latter days, making sure that the DL course is being offered by a conventional higher-education institution as opposed to some other kind of alternative provider is less important to me than it might be to others.
Google: computer forensics intitle:"bachelor" +online site:edu Searches for the term computer forensics and the title of the website has bachelor in it, site:edu simply restricts the sites searched to .edu
I would suggest not using the online in quotes as anything in quotes will be searched for exact matches. "Bachelor of Education" +online site:edu will likely yield better results. Searching google for: "online bachelor of education" site:edu results in 3 matches while "Bachelor of Education" +online site:edu results in 1,280. ..gotta love google!
OK - to help folks out with Google, I'll give a brief breakdown of some of the search criteria you can use when searching: use - the leave something out of a search, ie. searching for ipod on google but you don't want ebay to be searched, simply use: ipod -ebay if you want specific searches, put it in quotes. "bachelor of education" yields 887,000 matches; bachelor of education yields 6,470,000 matches. intitle: restricts the search to the titles of web pages. intext: searches only the body text site: narrows the search to a site or top-level domain. filetype: searches the suffices or filename extensions. ie. filetypedf searches only for pdf files. Those are only a few but you can get very specific and cut out a lot of poor search results with the proper criteria. Hope it helps
You're right, the terminology varies. I've also found programs referred to as "external degrees," typically in some non-US universities.
..should've included this in my post above: you can use the OR to help your search(yes, the OR must be capitalized, else it is simply a stop word (ignored). ie. "bachelor of education" +"external degree" OR "distance learning" that will search any of the words in the quotes. Note also that Google restricts its searches to 10 words, so anything more than 10 will simply be ignored..
search tips Thanks to all for posting search tips. I learned some great info from this forum today. I didnt realize some of these techniques were possible to focus a search.
